Tag Archives: Marijuana

QP: Bombardier bonus brouhaha

Posted on by

Starting off the last two-week stretch before the Easter Break, there remained a number of empty desks in the Commons, but all leaders were in attendance, so there was that. Rona Ambrose led off, asking about the possibility of radicalized workers at the Montreal airport. Justin Trudeau assured her that they were working diligently to assure her that they were taking security seriously. Ambrose switched to English to demand those workers be fired (which I’m not sure is his call), and Trudeau reminded her that they were supporting law enforcement agencies who were keeping us safe. Ambrose then switched to the compensation of Bombardier executives, and Trudeau acknowledged that the government gave a loan, but he was pleased to see they were reconsidering that decision. Ambrose switched to English to ask again, and got much the same response. For her final question, Ambrose railed about the loss of tax credits in the light of those Bombardier bonuses, and Trudeau latched onto the transit tax credit portion of the question and noted it was the only thing the previous government did for transit and his government was doing more. Thomas Mulcair was up next, returning to the Bombardier bonuses, to which Trudeau stressed that they made a loan, and again reiterated that he was happy they were changing course on those bonuses. Mulcair switched to French to rail about the lack of job guarantees, and Trudeau insisted that the loan would protect jobs. Mulcair switched to the issue of emissions targets, and Trudeau insisted they were committing their promise to reduce them. Mulcair went for a second round in French, noting that Environment Canada has said that they wouldn’t be able to meet the Harper targets, while Trudeau retorted that the analysis was based on the previous government’s actions, not those of his government.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Staffers defend Canadian presidentialism

Posted on by

Andrew Coyne’s column on reverting to a system of caucus selection of party leaders got a lot of pushback over the Twitter Machine on Saturday, and curiously, those most in favour of retaining our current bastardized system of membership-selection were those who currently or formerly worked in the PMO (as well as a couple of current leadership candidates who don’t currently have seats in the House of Commons, which isn’t surprising seeing as they’d be excluded from such an exercise and well, they have egos to stroke given their current leadership ambitions).

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848196824334823424

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848199704898940928

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848202229727338498

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848202871741046784

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848203006982180865

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/848203776028811267

https://twitter.com/jec79/status/848185597516820480

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/848226392533860352

And this presidentialization creep is what really gets under my skin, because it’s those who benefit from unearned power – the people in the PMO (less kids in short pants these days than they were under the previous government) who are the most ardent defenders of the system, and using this faux democratic mandate of the 150,000 “supporters” of the party as justification. What none of them bring up is the fact that the PM is unaccountable to those members in any real sense, and certainly unaccountable to the caucus he leads, and that’s a very big problem. And no, a system like that proposed in Democratizing the Constitution of membership selection/caucus removal would never work in practice because unless the method of selection matches the method of removal, there is a legitimacy problem, not to mention this is what happened with both Greg Selinger in Manitoba and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and look at where both of them are today. It’s not pretty, and it’s bad for our Westminster system. Caucus selection is really the system we need to revert to if we want accountable leaders and empowered MPs who aren’t being cowed by centralized leaders and their staffers, and we won’t get that now, especially if those staffers are all over the Twitter Machine trying to defend their turf.

Continue reading →

Roundup: MPs shouldn’t become social convenors

Posted on by

Sometimes when former politicians opine on their former profession, it can be insightful, and sometimes inspiring, but sometimes it can be gobsmackingly terrible. Former Ontario MPP and cabinet minister John Milloy ventures into the latter category with a piece in Policy Options on the “future of work” when it comes to parliamentarians. After Milloy correctly asserts that most parliamentarians don’t know their own job descriptions and that leaves them vulnerable to the machinations of unelected political staff, he veers off about how nobody trusts politicians anyway so their actual roles are becoming obsolete and hey, government is too slow to deal with policy in the modern world, so let’s turn our parliamentarians into social convenors.

No, seriously.

Apparently, the real drivers of change and action are service clubs, community groups and church organizations, so what parliamentarians should be doing is trying to bring those groups together to do stuff because they’re not community leaders anymore, so hey, they can be referees or coaches instead!

Head. Desk.

One would think that someone who used to be in elected politics like Milloy was would understand that the whole point of grassroots riding associations is to gather those kinds of voices around policy concerns, where they could help develop those into concrete proposals to bring to the party, or to communicate their concerns to the caucus (whether or not theirs is the elected MP in the riding). A properly run riding association has the hallmarks of service clubs or community groups because they provide both the social aspect around shared values, and work toward the care and feeding of political parties from the ground-up, the way that they’re supposed to. This is the kind of thing that we need to be encouraging if we want a properly functioning political system in this country. Instead, Milloy would see us let that atrophy and let outsiders shout from the side lines while the political staffers continue to consolidate power in the leaders’ offices. No, that’s not how politics are supposed to work. We can’t keep washing out hands of this and dismissing political organizations. Joining parties and getting involved is the way to make change happen, and as for MPs, we can’t just let this trend of self-made obsolesce go unchallenged. The “future of work” shouldn’t be irrelevance – it should be re-engaging with the system and actually doing their jobs. And shame on Milloy for abandoning his former profession to the wolves.

Continue reading →

Roundup: What to do about Beyak?

Posted on by

The CBC caught up with Senator Lynn Beyak yesterday, and she essentially doubled down on her insistence that she’s said nothing wrong about residential schools, and then compounded the whole thing by insisting that she’s been “suffering with” these residential school survivors because she lives in the area with them and she once went on double dates with an Aboriginal fellow. The mind boggles.

So with this having been said, and Beyak insisting that she’s not going anywhere, people are starting to wonder what’s next (as they demand her resignation, if not from the Senate then at least the Aboriginal Peoples committee). Let’s deconstruct this a little first, shall we?

To start off with, as a member of the committee, Beyak is not really making decisions around Indigenous policy in this country, as some people are suggesting. The government – meaning Cabinet – still makes that policy, and the Senate and in particular the committee does their due diligence in holding them to account. They’re not actually making policy themselves. Add to that, Beyak is one vote out of fifteen (remember that committees in this current session are now oversized because that was how to add in new independent members without a prorogation to reset committee selection), so her vote is even more diluted than it would be in a regular parliamentary session. And given that her views are off-side with her own party’s, it’s not like she’s really going to be the swing-vote in any case. So let’s calm down about that. While the committee chair has suggested that Beyak step aside, it’s not really her call as to whether Beyak is a member or not – that’s up to caucus leadership (or in the case of the Independent Senators’ Group, they volunteered for committee assignments), and there’s nothing the Chair can do about it. But if the Conservative Senate leadership is aware that Beyak being on that committee is a problem, they can probably arrange to have her rotated off of it (if not right away, then certainly when the committees reset at the next prorogation).

Some people has suggested that Beyak be kicked out of Conservative caucus, but I’m less certain that that’s a good idea. For one, her being in caucus allows the Conservative leadership to maintain some level of control over her, and if she’s forced out, where is she going to go? The ISG, where she can look at Senator Murray Sinclair every organizing meeting?

As for the comparisons between Beyak and Senator Don Meredith – because people have been making them – it’s a specious comparison that needs to stop. He’s broken ethics rules (and possibly the law), whereas Beyak’s crime is wilful ignorance. That’s not actually illegal or against the ethics code, and no, you can’t expel her for it. What they can do, however, is maybe consider a policy of phasing her out – making it as unrewarding as possible for her to be there that she eventually leaves. It’s an inexact science, particularly for someone as clueless as Beyak, and this whole episode should serve as one more reminder as to why it’s important to take some care in choosing who to appoint, because they’ll be there for a long time with little recourse for removal (and Stephen Harper quite obviously was not taking care).

Continue reading →

Roundup: The Luddite debate

Posted on by

The NDP held their second leadership debate yesterday in Montreal on the theme of youth, and the first part of the event went pretty much as expected. All four candidates went on endlessly about the need for free tuition without actually seeming to grasp the underlying issues with such a pledge – not only that in Canada, this is an area of provincial jurisdiction (and no, it’s not as easy as giving the provinces a whack of cash and telling them “this is for free tuition!” because watch what happens when you start putting strings on provincial spending), and the fact that there are always limited resources no matter how you slice it. That means that if you’re offering free tuition, that tends to mean you either need to raise the bar for entrance to universities so that it’s higher and weeds people out, or you water everything down and the quality of the education you’re offering for free declines because systems have only so much capacity and you’re not going to find an infinite number of good profs who are willing to make the smaller salary dollars you’re able to offer in order to keep tuition free for all. It’s basic economic theory.

The other issues paid a great deal of lip service were precarious work, and automation, and while there was a lot of talk about it, I’m not sure there were a lot of answers. Just decrying precarious work doesn’t mean that the government has the power to mandate that there be full-time employment, especially when the problem is in part because of demographics (as in, there aren’t enough Boomers retiring fast enough for jobs to be taken up by Millennials in a serious capacity) and the fact that the economy is restructuring itself and we haven’t arrived at sustainable models for a number of fields yet, particularly when some of those jobs bump up against other Millennial maxims like “information wants to be free” and nobody wanting to have to pay for content that they nevertheless want to be paid to create. But this also fits in with the question of automation, which the candidates didn’t have much to answer with either.

https://twitter.com/tocpug/status/846076823071023104

Being worried about automation while at the same time insisting that you want “value-added” jobs and the kinds of manufacturing jobs that we saw in the fifties and sixties is kind of like the Trump promise to return to coal-fired electricity, which no longer makes sense in the age of cheap natural gas. Those kind of jobs aren’t going to exist because there’s no economic rationale for them, particularly when our economy is moving more toward being service-based. Not to mention, automation is largely taking over the most menial of tasks, which is why it’s not a bad thing that it’s happening. And sure, there are differing ways to deal with it, from skills retraining (as the Liberals are trying to move toward with aspects of their new budget) to basic income (which Guy Caron is proposing), but that may not in the end be feasible. But you can’t just say that you’ll ban automation or tax it in the hopes of supporting displaced workers, while at the same time demanding greater innovation because things don’t work that way. Innovation will demand disruption, which these candidates seem to want do avoid. If things did with without disruption, we’d still all be labouring on farms. And that’s why I found the leadership candidates to be largely unconvincing on this topic. It is an issue we’ll have to deal with, but you can’t just wish for old manufacturing jobs to come back as the answer. It’s not going to happen.

Continue reading →

QP: The perpetual call for lower taxes

Posted on by

While the PM off in Houston, the benches were a little emptier today. Rona Ambrose led off, worrying that the government wasn’t doing enough to cut taxes in the face of the Trumpocalypse — assuming that anyone can actually decipher what signals are actually being given there. Scott Brison responded, citing the tax cuts and Canadian Child Benefit that have lifted children out of poverty. Ambrose demanded lower taxes and less red tape, to which Navdeep Bains listed the stats on job creation and the number of companies expanding investing or expanding in Canada. Ambrose asked for the same as it comes to small business, and Bardish Chagger relayed her government’s concern for those small businesses are looking to help them succeed. Alain Rayes worried about tax burden being passed onto his daughter with higher deficits, to which Scott Brison reiterated his previous comments in French. Rayes asked again about small businesses in French, and Chagger gave a more truncated version of her previous response in French. Matthew Dubé led off for the NDP, worrying about Quebeckers being turned away from the US border, to which Ahmed Hussen said that he couldn’t speak to individual cases, but they need to raise concerns with American authorities. Dubé changed to English to demand an end to the safe third country agreement, but Hussen reminded him that the UNHCR still considers the States a safe country. Tracey Ramsey worried about auto parts rules under NAFTA, which Chrystia Freeland assured her that it was her priority to fight those American rules. Ramsey demanded to know what the government planned to bring up in trade negotiations, but Freeland chastised Ramsey for trying to get her to negotiate in the media.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A reasonable plea for restitution

Posted on by

Retired Senator Sharon Carstairs is looking to be reimbursed for some $80,000 in legal fees after being caught up in the Auditor General’s report on expenses, and it’s a tale that exposes how shabbily many senators were treated in the wake of that report. To recap, that AG report essentially made up a bunch of rules that did not exist, particularly around how many days a year constituted “primary residency,” which Carstairs got caught up in. And in a rush to show the public that they were taking this report seriously, the Senate turned over the report directly to the RCMP, and Carstairs was left trying to keep her reputation intact, hence retaining counsel and trying to explain that she hadn’t broken any rules.

What needs to be repeated again with this story is just how problematic that AG report was. When the Senate later retained its own counsel to go over that report to see if they should try to sue any of the senators who had refused to repay or seek arbitration for the identified sums (which included Carstairs), that legal review laid bare the arbitrary rules that the AG imposed as part of his review, and essentially how shoddily it was done. And I know several senators who simply opted to pay back the sum rather than keep fighting it because they wanted it to go away – Carstairs refused, and it looks like she’s going to be punished for it, whether financially with the loss (the maximum reimbursement for legal fees under Senate rules is generally $25,000), but also with the loss of reputation. I would hope that the Senate has had enough time since the audit that they can now revisit this case and offer the apology and what restitution they can, and admit that they were hasty in their actions because they were trying to appease a public that was baying for blood post-Duffy, for what good it did them. I would also hope that more of my media colleagues would also start calling out the AG for the problems in his report when cases like Carstairs’ come up again in the media, but I suspect that won’t happen, as we pay far too much deference to him as being untouchable and infallible, when clearly that’s not the case.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A mystifying new delay

Posted on by

It yet another attempt to throw a spanner into the workings of the legislative process trying to bring genetic privacy legislation to fruition in this country, the government has decided to hold yet more consultations while they simultaneously are attempting to gut the bill at report stage, despite the objections of the Senate (which passed the bill originally) and the Commons justice committee, which studied the bill, heard from witnesses, and gave it an all-clear.

Jody Wilson-Raybould is suddenly brandishing letters from three provinces who have “concerns” about the constitutionality of the bill, despite the fact that they never objected in the years – and I will stress years – that this bill has been wending its way through parliament, both in the previous parliament and the current one. Seven provinces indicated support, and there are legal and constitutional scholars that have testified that the mechanisms in the bill are perfectly sound and within federal jurisdiction. None of this should be in dispute, but for as much as the government professes to care about this issue, the fact that they are quick to try and gut the bill and leave it up for a patchwork of provincial laws for the insurance component of genetic discrimination – which is a very big issue – it’s mystifying. I have heard grumblings that the only kinds of bills that they favour are their own, which I get, but at the same time, this is a piece of legislation that has already withstood a great deal of scrutiny and is something that is critically needed, as we are the only western country that doesn’t have these kinds of protections. With any luck, the Liberal backbenchers are going to push back on the attempts to gut the bill and it can move ahead, but right now, the constant delay is lacking coherence.

Continue reading →

Senate QP: A slow-moving tsunami

Posted on by

While the Commons and Senate calendars are out of sync, the Senate is sitting this week while the Commons is not, and we still had ministerial QP in the Senate today, with special guest star, health minister Jane Philpott, this being her third appearance before the Senate. Just before things got underway, the Speaker noted that the leaders had agreed to tweaks on the order of questions, and cutting down on the number of supplementals asked in order to get more questions in. Senator Carignan led off asking about the plans for legalised marijuana, worrying that they were not following evidence-based policy especially around the risks. Philpott said that despite appearances, there are a number of gaps in knowledge around cannabis and praise the work of Anne McLelland’s panel. She also noted that because the largest number of pot users are younger people, they need to keep that in mind in the legislation they draft.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Manning and the Populists

Posted on by

It’s the Manning Centre conference here in Ottawa, which is the “conservative Woodstock,” as they say, and is pretty much were all of the small-c conservatives come to network, only this year, in the midst of the Trumpocalypse happening south of the border, the flavour of this year’s conference has changed, with much more pandering to the fringe elements, catering to overblown fears of Islamic terrorism and the kinds of populist demagoguery that are suddenly in vogue. Oh, and all fourteen Conservative leadership candidates are also there, and hey, they had a little debate, which allowed them a bit more freedom to actually debate in small groups, but most of it was still their canned talking points, so take it for what it’s worth.

As for conference programming, here’s Kady O’Malley’s recap of the first half including Preston Manning’s speech, and her assessment that fears of a Trumpist takeover appear to be more overblown, as many of the demagogic panels have had less than spectacular attendance. John Geddes recaps the moments of the leadership debate that had the biggest sparks. Geddes also has a conversation with Manning about populism and how it’s shaping debates right now.

Andrew Coyne warns Conservatives at the Manning Conference about the siren song of populist demagoguery. Chris Selley looks at that demagoguery up close in the panel on the “Islamist extremist menace” at the Conference, calling it bonkers. John Ivison looks at the dynamic Kevin O’Leary is bringing to the Conference and the race, and the outsized role he is starting to play, building an “Anyone but O’Leary” vibe. Paul Wells notes the changes in the Conference’s tenor over the years as a result of the political culture of followership, eager to imitate the perceived leaders of their pack.

Continue reading →